Free Edition of PicSay on the Android Market

Oktober 27, 2008 by Eric Wijngaard

Personalize your pictures with PicSay, the award winning image editor for Android. Spice up the pictures on your T-Mobile G1 by adding word balloons, titles, graphics, and effects like distortion, color correction and highlighting. All in a fun, intuitive, and easy-to-use interface.

Say it within a picture.

PicSay's intuitive user interface makes it really easy to quickly add word balloons, titles, and props to your picture. Just pick a style you like and type your message. Add common phrases like "Happy Birthday" or "Wish You Were Here" in an instant without sliding out the keyboard, or let PicSay find the address information for your current location so you can use it as text for your picture. Creating E-cards on your mobile phone has never been simpler.

Effects.

PicSay has a large number of effects that allow you to enhance your picture for a variety of purposes. For fun, you can use Distort to bulge, pinch, stretch and twirl people's faces. Spotlight and Marker allow you to highlight interesting parts of your picture. And if your picture looks a bit too dark or too blue, you can use the various color correction effects like Brightness and Temperature to fix it. These, and other effects provide you with everything you need to let a single picture do all the talking.

Where can I get it?

PicSay is currently only available for Android on a T-Mobile G1. G1 users can download a free edition of PicSay from Market application on their phone.

PicSay in the top 10 of the Android Developer Challenge

August 30, 2008 by Eric Wijngaard

I am pleased to announce that PicSay is one of the winners of Google's Android Developer Challenge. PicSay is an easy to use application with an intuitive user interface that allows you to quickly add word balloons, titles, props and effects to the pictures on your mobile phone. You can then send them to your friends and family or share them with the world via your blog or the various photo sites on the web. For more information about all the finalists see the official announcement at the Android Developers Blog.

Taking part in the Challenge and creating PicSay for Android has been, and still is, a great experience and I am excited about the things to come. I would like to thank the Android team and Google for making this challenge possible.

I would also like to clear up an early rumor on the web about me that suggests that althought I won this prize I would actually prefer the iPhone over Android, which is not the case. It is amazing how you can have a phone conversation with a Dutch journalist in your own native language and then being quoted hours later in English saying something completely different. Here is what happened:

The day after the winners were announced I immediately got a lot of phone calls from the press in my home country the Netherlands. I was happy to answer their questions. Soon after, articles appeared on the various news sites in the Netherlands, some quoting me more accurately than others.

Then a reader, probably a devoted iPhone fan, decided to creatively translate parts of one of these articles in English, which started the whole thing.

Below are my original answers to some of the questions a reporter had and how they somehow ended up as English quotes. The phone conversation was of course in Dutch so what follows is my own correct translation.

I was asked the question: "What made you enter the Android Developer Challenge". This was my reply:

"Last year when Apple released the iPhone in the United States, I thought, It would be great if I could create applications for that, but there was no SDK at the time. Then, later that year in November Google released the Android SDK and announced the Android Developer Challenge. I decided to take a look, and that turned out to be a great choice."

After the quote was cut for space to a single sentence in the original Dutch article, someone thought it would be nice to translate this into:

“What I really wanted to do was develop an iPhone app. The iPhone SDK wasn’t out yet, though.”

Completely missing that I did not know about Android at that time. But I can see how an iPhone fan would translate it into this quote, but there is more:

I was also asked the question: "What will you do with the money". This was my reply:

"I have my own company that I can invest in"

Then a follow-up question about what's next and if there will be an iPhone version. This was my reply:

"Right now, I am focusing on Android and I want to make sure that PicSay will run on the actual Android-based phone when it is launched. It is possible to create an iPhone version of PicSay, and I would like to do that some day, but there is no time for that now."

Even more miraculous the above ended up as:

“I guess I could invest it in my software company, but first I want to port PicSay to the iPhone.”

I don't know who created that translation because that is not even in the original Dutch article.

Two tiny quotes in English that are not mine and then the Copy-Paste phenomenon starts on the Internet and I am marked as an ungrateful person who prefers the iPhone platform over the Android platform.

I love the iPhone platform as much as I love the Android platform. Like many of the other finalists, I can't wait to see my application PicSay run on an actual Android device. I am just a developer who wants to create applications.

In the end, I have nothing to complain about though. Winning this prize is absolutely fantastic. So instead of these ramblings I intend to give you more information about PicSay soon, so stay tuned!

Thank you

Eric Wijngaard

Update: Many websites have have already posted updates with the correct quotes. Thanks everybody.